V.

by Thomas Pynchon

  It did bring up, however, an interesting note of sexual ambiguity. What a joke if at the end of this hunt he came face to face with himself afflicted by a kind of soul-transvestism. How the Crew would laugh and laugh. Truthfully he didn’t know what sex V. might be, nor even what genus and species. To go along assuming that Victoria the girl tourist and Veronica the sewer rat were one and the same V. was not at all to bring up any metempsychosis: only to affirm that his quarry fitted in with The Big One, the century’s master cabal, in the same way Victoria had with the Vheissu plot and Veronica with the new rat-order. If she was a historical fact then she continued active today and at the moment, because the ultimate Plot Which Has No Name was as yet unrealized, though V. might be no more a she than a sailing vessel or a nation.

  Early in May Eigenvalue introduced Stencil to Bloody Chiclitz, president of Yoyodyne, Inc., a company with factories scattered careless about the country and more government contracts than it really knew what to do with. In the late 1940s Yoyodyne had been breezing along comfortably as the Chiclitz Toy Company, with one tiny independent-making shop on the outskirts of Nutley, New Jersey. For some reason the children of America conceived around this time a simultaneous and psychopathic craving for simple gyroscopes, the kind which are set in motion by a string wound around the rotating shaft, something like a top. Chiclitz, recognizing a market potential there, decided to expand. He was well on the way to cornering the toy gyroscope market when along came a group of school kids on tour to point out that these toys worked on the same principle as a gyrocompass. “As wha,” said Chiclitz. They explained gyrocompasses to him, also rate and free gyros. Chiclitz remembered vaguely from a trade magazine that the government was always in the market for these. They used them on ships, airplanes, more lately, missiles. “Well,” figured Chiclitz, “why not.” Small-business opportunities in the field at the time were being described as abundant. Chiclitz started making gyros for the government. Before he knew it he was also in telemeter instrumentation, test-set components, small communications equipment. He kept expanding, buying, merging. Now less than ten years later he had built up an interlocking kingdom responsible for systems management, airframes, propulsion, command systems, ground support equipment. Dyne, one newly hired engineer had told him, was a unit of force. So to symbolize the humble beginnings of the Chiclitz empire and to get the idea of force, enterprise, engineering skill and rugged individualism in there too, Chiclitz christened the company Yoyodyne.

  Stencil toured one plant out on Long Island. Among instruments of war, he reasoned, some clue to the cabal might show up. It did. He’d wandered into a region of offices, drafting boards, blueprint files. Soon Stencil discovered, sitting half hidden in a forest of file cabinets, and sipping occasionally at the coffee in a paper cup which for today’s engineer is practically uniform-of-the-day, a balding and porcine gentleman in a suit of European cut. The engineer’s name was Kurt Mondaugen, he had worked, yes, at Peenemünde, developing Vergeltungswaffe Eins and Zwei. The magic initial! Soon the afternoon had gone and Stencil had made an appointment to renew the conversation.

  A week or so later, in one of the secluded side rooms of the Rusty Spoon, Mondaugen yarned, over an abominable imitation of Munich beer, about youthful days in South-West Africa.

  Stencil listened attentively. The tale proper and the questioning after took no more than thirty minutes. Yet the next Wednesday afternoon at Eigenvalue’s office, when Stencil retold it, the yarn had undergone considerable change: had become, as Eigenvalue put it, Stencilized.

  chapter nine

  Mondaugen’s

  story

  V

  I

  One May morning in 1922 (meaning nearly winter here in the Warmbad district) a young engineering student named Kurt Mondaugen, late of the Technical University in Munich, arrived at a white outpost near the village of Kalkfontein South. More voluptuous than fat, with fair hair, long eyelashes and a shy smile that enchanted older women, Mondaugen sat in an aged Cape cart idly picking his nose, waiting for the sun to come up and contemplating the pontok or grass hut of Willem van Wijk, a minor extremity of the Administration in Windhoek. His horse drowsed and collected dew while Mondaugen squirmed on the seat, trying to control anger, confusion, petulance; and below the farthest verge of the Kalahari, that vast death, the tardy sun mocked him.

  Originally a native of Leipzig, Mondaugen exhibited at least two aberrations peculiar to the region. One (minor), he had the Saxon habit of attaching diminutive endings to nouns, animate or inanimate, at apparent random. Two (major), he shared with his fellow-citizen Karl Baedeker a basic distrust of the South, however relative a region that might be. Imagine then the irony with which he viewed his present condition, and the horrid perversity he fancied had driven him first to Munich for advanced study, then (as if, like melancholy, this southsickness were progressive and incurable) finally to leave depression-time in Munich, journey into this other hemisphere, and enter mirror-time in the South-West Protectorate.

  Mondaugen was here as part of a program having to do with atmospheric radio disturbances: sferics for short. During the Great War one H. Barkhausen, listening in on telephone messages among the Allied forces, heard a series of falling tones, much like a slide whistle descending in pitch. Each of these “whistlers” (as Barkhausen named them) lasted only about a second and seemed to be in the low or audio-frequency range. As it turned out, the whistler was only the first of a family of sferics whose taxonomy was to include clicks, hooks, risers, nose-whistlers and one like a warbling of birds called the dawn chorus. No one knew exactly what caused any of them. Some said sunspots, others lightning bursts; but everyone agreed that in there someplace was the earth’s magnetic field, so a plan evolved to keep a record of sferics received at different latitudes. Mondaugen, near the bottom of the list, drew South-West Africa, and was ordered to set up his equipment as close to 28° S. as he conveniently could.

  It had disturbed him at first, having to live in what had once been a German colony. Like most violent young men—and not a few stuffy old ones—he found the idea of defeat hateful. But he soon discovered that many Germans who’d been landowners before the war had simply continued on, allowed by the government of the Cape to keep their citizenship, property and native workers. A kind of expatriate social life had indeed developed at the farm of one Foppl, in the northern part of the district, between the Karas range and the marches of the Kalahari, and within a day’s journey of Mondaugen’s recovery station. Boisterous were the parties, lively the music, jolly the girls that had filled Foppl’s baroque plantation house nearly every night since Mondaugen’s arrival, in a seemingly eternal Fasching. But now what well-being he’d found in this godforsaken region seemed about to evaporate.

  The sun rose and van Wijk appeared in his doorway like a two-dimensional figure jerked suddenly onstage by hidden pulleys. A vulture lit in front of the hut and stared at van Wijk. Mondaugen himself acquired motion; jumped down off the cart, moved toward the hut.

  Van Wijk waved a bottle of homemade beer at him. “I know,” he shouted across the parched earth between them, “I know. I’ve been up all night with it. You think I don’t have more to worry about?”

  “My antennas,” Mondaugen cried.

  “Your antennas, my Warmbad district,” the Boer said. He was half drunk. “Do you know what happened yesterday? Get worried. Abraham Morris has crossed the Orange.”

  Which, as had been intended, shook Mondaugen. He managed, “Only Morris?”

  “Six men, some women and children, rifles, stock. It isn’t that. Morris isn’t a man. He’s a Messiah.”

  Mondaugen’s annoyance had given way all at once to fear; fear began to bud from his intestinal walls.

  “They threatened to rip down your antennas, didn’t they.”

  But he’d done nothing. . . .

  Van Wijk snorted. “You contributed.
You told me you’d listen for disturbances and record certain data. You didn’t say you’d blast them out all over my bush country and become a disturbance yourself. The Bondelswaartz believe in ghosts, the sferics frighten them. Frightened, they’re dangerous.”

  Mondaugen admitted he’d been using an audio amplifier and loudspeaker. “I fall asleep,” he explained. “Different sorts come in at different times of day. I’m a one-man research team, I have to sleep sometime. The little loudspeaker is set up at the head of my cot, I’ve conditioned myself to awake instantaneously, so no more than the first few of any group are lost. . . .”

  “When you return to your station,” van Wijk cut in, “those antennas will be down, and your equipment smashed. A moment—” as the young man turned, redfaced and snuffling—“before you dash off screaming revenge, one word. Just one. An unpleasant word: rebellion.”

  “Every time a Bondel talks back to you people, it’s rebellion.” Mondaugen looked as if he might cry.

  “Abraham Morris has joined forces by now with Jacobus Christian and Tim Beukes. They’re trekking north. You saw for yourself that they’d heard about it already in your own neighborhood. It wouldn’t surprise me if every Bondelswaartz in the district were under arms within the week. Not to mention a number of homicidally-disposed Veldschoendragers and Witboois from up north. Witboois are always looking for a fight.” Inside the hut a telephone began to ring. Van Wijk saw the look on Mondaugen’s face. “Yes,” he said. “Wait here, it may be interesting news.” He vanished inside. From a nearby hut came the sound of a Bondelswaartz pennywhistle, insubstantial as wind, monotonous as sunlight in a dry season. Mondaugen listened as if it had something to say to him. It didn’t.

  Van Wijk appeared in the doorway. “Now listen to me, younker, if I were you I would go to Warmbad and stay there until this blows over.”

  “What’s happened.”

  “That was the location superintendent at Guruchas. Apparently they caught up with Morris, and a Sergeant van Niekerk tried an hour ago to get him to come in to Warmbad peacefully. Morris refused, van Niekerk placed his hand on Morris’s shoulder in token of arrest. According to the Bondel version—which you may be sure has already spread to the Portuguese frontier—the Sergeant then proclaimed ‘Die lood van die Goevernement sal nou op julle smelt.’ The lead of the Government shall now melt upon you. Poetic, wouldn’t you say?

  “The Bondels with Morris took it as a declaration of war. So the balloon’s gone up, Mondaugen. Go to Warmbad, better yet keep going and get safely across the Orange. That’s my best advice.”

  “No, no,” Mondaugen said, “I am something of a coward, you know that. But tell me your second-best advice, because you see there are my antennas.”

  “You worry about your antennas as if they sprouted from your forehead. Go ahead. Return—if you have the courage, which I certainly don’t—return up-country and tell them at Foppl’s what you’ve heard here. Hole up in that fortress of his. If you want my own opinion it will be a blood bath. You weren’t here in 1904. But ask Foppl. He remembers. Tell him the days of von Trotha are back again.”

  “You could have prevented this,” Mondaugen cried. “Isn’t that what you’re all here for, to keep them happy? To remove any need for rebellion?”

  Van Wijk exploded in a bitter fit of laughing. “You seem,” he finally drawled, “to be under certain delusions about the civil service. History, the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history. He doesn’t fight it, he tries to coexist with it.

  “Die lood van die Goevernement indeed. We are, perhaps, the lead weights of a fantastic clock, necessary to keep it in motion, to keep an ordered sense of history and time prevailing against chaos. Very well! Let a few of them melt. Let the clock tell false time for a while. But the weights will be reforged, and rehung, and if there doesn’t happen to be one there in the shape or name of Willem van Wijk to make it run right again, so much the worse for me.”

  To this curious soliloquy Kurt Mondaugen flipped a desperate farewell salute, climbed into his Cape cart, and headed back up-country. The trip was uneventful. Once in a great while an oxcart would materialize out of the scrubland; or a jet-black kite would come to hang in the sky, studying something small and quick among the cactus and thorn trees. The sun was hot. Mondaugen leaked at every orifice; fell asleep, was jolted awake; once dreamed gunshots and human screams. He arrived at the recovery station in the afternoon, found the Bondel village nearby quiet and his equipment undisturbed. Working as quickly as he could, he dismantled the antennas and packed them and the receiving equipment in the Cape cart. Half a dozen Bondelswaartz stood around watching. By the time he was ready to leave the sun was nearly down. From time to time, at the edges of his field of vision, Mondaugen would see small scurrying bands of Bondels, seeming almost to merge with the twilight, moving in and out of the small settlement in every direction. Somewhere to the west a dogfight had started. As he tightened the last half-hitch a pennywhistle began to play nearby, and it took him only a moment to realize that the player was imitating sferics. Bondels who were watching started to giggle. The laughter swelled, until it sounded like a jungleful of small exotic animals, fleeing some basic danger. But Mondaugen knew well enough who was fleeing what. The sun set, he climbed on the cart. No one said anything in farewell: all he heard at his back were the whistle and the laughter.

  It was several more hours to Foppl’s. The only incident en route was a flurry of gunfire—real, this time—off to his left, behind a hill. At last, quite early in the morning, the lights of Foppl’s burst on him suddenly out of the scrubland’s absolute blackness. He crossed a small ravine on a plank bridge and drew up before the door.

  As usual a party was in progress, a hundred windows blazed, the gargoyles, arabesques, pargeting and fretwork of Foppl’s “villa” vibrated in the African night. A cluster of girls and Foppl himself stood at the door while the farm’s Bondels offloaded the Cape cart and Mondaugen reported the situation.

  The news alarmed certain of Foppl’s neighbors who owned farms and stock nearby. “But it would be best,” Foppl announced to the party, “if we all stayed here. If there’s to be burning and destruction, it will happen whether or not you’re there to defend your own. If we disperse our strength they can destroy us as well as our farms. This house is the best fortress in the region: strong, easily defended. House and grounds are protected on all sides by deep ravines. There is more than enough food, good wine, music and—” winking lewdly—“beautiful women.

  “To hell with them out there. Let them have their war. In here we shall hold Fasching. Bolt the doors, seal the windows, tear down the plank bridges and distribute arms. Tonight we enter a state of siege.”

  II

  Thus began Foppl’s Siege Party. Mondaugen left after two and a half months. In that time no one had ventured outside, or received any news from the rest of the district. By the time Mondaugen departed, a dozen bottles of wine still lay cobwebbed in the cellar, a dozen cattle remained to be slaughtered. The vegetable garden behind the house was still abundant with tomatoes, yams, chard, herbs. So affluent was the farmer Foppl.

  The day after Mondaugen’s arrival, the house and grounds were sealed off from the outside world. Up went an inner palisade of strong logs, pointed at the top, and down went the bridges. A watch list was made up, a General Staff appointed, all in the spirit of a new party game.

  A curious crew were thus thrown together. Many, of course, were German: rich neighbors, visitors from Windhoek and Swakopmund. But there were also Dutch and English from the Union; Italians, Austrians, Belgians from the diamond fields near the coast; French, Russian, Spanish and one Pole from various corners of the earth; all creating the appearance of a tiny European Conclave or League of Nations, assembled here while political chaos howled outside.
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  Early on the morning after his arrival, Mondaugen was up on the roof, stringing his antennas along the iron fanciwork that topped the villa’s highest gable. He had an uninspiring view of ravines, grass, dry pans, dust, scrub; all repeating, undulating east to the eventual wastes of the Kalahari; north to a distant yellow exhalation that rose from far under the horizon and seemed to hang eternally over the Tropic of Capricorn.

  Back here Mondaugen could also see down into a kind of inner courtyard. Sunlight, filtered through a great sandstorm far away in the desert, bounced off an open bay window and down, too bright, as if amplified, into the courtyard to illuminate a patch or pool of deep red. Twin tendrils of it extended to a nearby doorway. Mondaugen shivered and stared. The reflected sunlight vanished up a wall and into the sky. He looked up, saw the window opposite complete its swing open and a woman of indeterminate age in a negligee of peacock blues and greens squint into the sun. Her left hand rose to her left eye, fumbled there as if positioning a monocle. Mondaugen crouched behind curlicues of wrought iron, astonished not so much at anything in her appearance as at his own latent desire to see and not be seen. He waited for the sun or her chance movement to show him nipples, navel, pubic hair.

  But she had seen him. “Come out, come out, gargoyle,” she called playfully. Mondaugen lurched vertical, lost his balance, nearly fell off the roof, grabbed hold of a lightning rod, slid to a 45° angle and began to laugh.

  “My little antennas,” he gurgled.

  “Come to the roof garden,” she invited, and disappeared then back into a white room turned to blinding enigma by a sun finally free of its Kalahari.